was evasive, and phony, and beautiful, and I hated her. All I could do was smile hard.
“Would it be okay for me to carpool with you girls tomorrow?” she asked. “My mother’s out of town for, like, months, and my dad’s busy with the move.”
Shelley was driving that week. Fuck. “Sure,” I said. “We leave at eight from my house. That one.” I pointed.
Jinny goes, “I’m excited about Sacred Heart. I met Pastor Hanson. He seems like a big ol’ teddy bear.”
Brooky cocked her head. “Headmaster Handsy?”
Delaney sighed. “More like grizzly bear.”
“His paws are definitely furry,” I added. “You’ll find that out when he strokes your thigh by accident during skirting at chapel next week.”
Skirting. Ugh. All the Christian schools do it. Row by row, we’re called up to the stage and made to kneel in a line, then the Pastor takes his yardstick and bends down to measure the distance from the floor to our hems, girl by girl. If we’re showing too many inches of thigh, we get detention. Skirting starts in middle school. In sixth grade you’re still too dumb to know dude’s copping a feel. In seventh you’re too embarrassed to admit you know what copping a feel is. When you’re in eighth, you and your friends laugh about it because you don’t know what else to do, and by frosh year you’re just sick of having feels copped. At least I was. That was when I told Shelley about Pastor Hanson’s roving paws. I asked her to, like, do something, and she confessed to me that Sherman had recently decided to stop paying the monthly bill at Sacred and she’d have to “tread lightly.” That’s the day I found out I’d become a scholarship kid.
On the morning that Shelley went in to tread lightly with Pastor Hanson, we girls waited in the hall, listening through a crack in the office door. I was so proud. Then Shelley started to talk and I wished I were spying alone. She spent the first part of the meeting thanking the Headmaster for the financial aid, which I hadn’t told the Hive about—so humiliating. Then she dropped her voice and told Handsy she’d heard murmurings about the girls feeling uncomfortable about his bare hands on their bare legs during skirting.
We all jumped back when we heard Pastor Handsy’s chair hit the floor; he must have stood up so fast he knocked it over. We froze in the hallway as he started raving about how skirting was necessary for modesty, and discipline, and Shelley must understand that he was like a clinician, a doctor. The idea that someone might think his intentions were anything but righteous enraged him. Shelley assured him it was just a rumor she’d heard on Parent Day but thought he should know. I can appreciate she didn’t want this confrontation, which was no confrontation, to come back on me, but there was a part of me that wanted that fucker to know I told. Shelley chilled him out, oh-so-gently suggesting he needed to change the skirting practice or, better still, eliminate it altogether if he wanted to avoid the rumor mill.
My mom came out of the Pastor’s office smiling like she nailed it, and we all just looked at her. Like, without even discussing it, we were all thinking the same thing. Thanks, but wha…? She didn’t call him out for the perv that he is, and she left with no resolution.
The girls and I managed to avoid Pastor Hanson until the next chapel day. He knew which pew I was in, and zeroed in on me, waiting until basically every girl in the school had followed the direction of his gaze. “We here at Sacred Heart have a long history of generosity to those less fortunate,” he said, outing me as a charity kid. Then he went on to say that he’d had a visitor, a concerned parent, who came to tell him that his students might be uncomfortable with being skirted. We were silent. All six hundred girls. How many had told? How many wanted to?
Then Hanson’s assistant, Mrs. Bunty, marches out to the stage with her polyester A-line and buttoned-up blouse and we girls look at each other, like, okay, maybe Shelley knew what she was doing. So now Mrs. Bunty’s going to do the skirting? Slightly less disgusting. But the Pastor’s secretary reaches into her blazer pocket and takes out a pair of white latex gloves, which she passes to Handsy, and